It has been announced today that the Virginian-Pilot and all of its subsequent affiliates, including Richmond’s Style Weekly, have been acquired by Chicago’s Tronc Inc. Tronc, once known as Tribune Publishing, currently owns the Baltimore Sun, Hartford Current, Orlando Sentinel, Sun-Sentinel, Hoy, Naperville Sun, El Sentinel del Sur de la Florida – along with a roster of smaller local papers – and until very recently the Los Angeles Times. The purchase of Landmark Media Enterprises, the parent company of the Virginian-Pilot was for $34 million and also included their brick and mortar location in Norfolk and their printing press in Virginia Beach.

In a statement about the acquisition, Tronc said: “The inclusion of The Virginian-Pilot further strengthens our presence in the region and renews our commitment to our longstanding tradition of journalistic excellence.” The Virginian-Pilot is 153 years old and one of the Commonwealth’s most regarded papers which has been locally owned for much of its existence. In a statement confirming the sale, Rusty Friddell, the general counsel for Landmark Media stated, “In order to most effectively continue its important work, The Virginian-Pilot must have the benefit of the resources of a large organization…Tronc brings the scale and commitment to best serve our important mission.”

The announcement of the sale of the Virginian-Pilot follows a nationwide trend of corporate media purchasing independent regional media platforms. Tronc, much like Sinclair Broadcasting – who in April of this year, made their broadcast affiliates across the US recite the same script regardless of location – represents a shift away from journalism as a mechanism for public accountability – and into a business model that prioritizes profits over news delivery as a public service. This represents a dangerous trend at a time when the press has come under attack by the president and politicians as “fake news” and the digital delivery of news content connected to un-intelligible social media algorithms that prioritize click-bait headlines.

Virginia will now enter into a 21st Century media landscape where the purchase of the Commonwealth’s largest daily newspaper will be guided by a media conglomerate with a track record of consolidating papers, layoffs, and reducing resources for journalists.

This has played out against Tronc during their short ownership of the Los Angeles Times – firing their editor-in-chief – along with a dozen other employees in April of this year. Tronc’s acquisitions have also seen the shuddering of major alternative-weeklies such as the New Haven Advocate and Baltimore City Paper. As an alternative-weekly, RVA Mag reached out to Style Weekly to see how this might impact their news operation. Publisher Lori Waran replied by saying, “Style Weekly is honored to have been a part of the Batten family’s storied portfolio of media and journals. We look forward to exciting days ahead with our new owners.”

The reality of these acquisitions tells another story, however. The consolidation of media platforms and the shuttering of alternative-weeklies has led to a modern phenomenon known as “news deserts.” Saving Community Journalism, a watchdog group out of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Journalism has analyzed this extensively in a report called The Emerging Threat of News Deserts. Among other things, the report highlighted, “Some new media barons — New Media/ GateHouse, Digital First, tronc and 10/13 Communications — have also implemented aggressive digital strategies, aimed at capturing new readers and at opening a wider revenue stream.”

The report went on to say that this new strategy is all about chasing “clicks” and “audiences” to “appeal to local advertisers, their cookie-cutter newspaper websites, and social media postings supply pithy and entertaining features for ‘sharing,’ ‘listicles’ and the sort of videos ubiquitous on the internet.”

All of which has an inverse impact on everything from local and state politics to public transparency where prioritizing feature stories from under-reported communities, tenacious investigative reporting, and provocative opinion pieces get downgraded for wire content and media that is easily produced for digital consumption. Virginia is currently home to 33 papers that are owned by external investment firms, seven of which now own 14 percent of all papers in the US. The Emerging Threat of News Deserts report has highlighted the business strategy of spreading the investment risk across multiple locations giving investment firms like Tronc the ability to “pursue a harvesting strategy in which they ‘manage the decline’ of assets in their portfolio.”

It’s not for nothing that City Lab summed up this conundrum in August last year when they talked about the “great alt-weekly die off” in smaller markets where “rival daily newspapers became one, or none.” Indeed this will now play out with Richmond’s Style Weekly and how collaborations between The Daily Press in Hampton – already owned by Tronc – and the Virginian-Pilot, now owned by Tronc are managed going forward.

How this impacts the media landscape in Virginia remains to be seen, but it is not hard to imagine the scenario after watching Tronc’s employee video. Anne Vasquez, the Chief Digital Officer, explains their media and business model.”One of the key ways we are going to harness the power of our journalism is to have an optimization group. This Tronc team will work with all the local markets to harness the power of our local journalism, feed it into a funnel, and then optimize so we reach the largest global market possible.”

Nothing says local journalism more than feeding it into a funnel to be optimized by “machine learning” and “artificial intelligence”.

Nonetheless, the sale of the Virginian-Pilot and its assets will have an outsized impact on the media landscape in Virginia. In a move not dissimilar from how Tronc has been known to operate, Virginian-Pilot journalist Jordan Pascale took to Twitter this morning to comment on the acquisition saying that the internal announcement was made via email at 9 am this morning. That tweet was preceded by another saying, “I’m legit shocked. We don’t have an email. There were no murmurs or rumors. We’ve been on the selling block for nearly a decade.”

There is a complicated relationship that exists amongst the public, the media, and the government when it comes to environmental conservation. Each sector plays its unique role in deciding the trajectory of every blossoming, burgeoning environmental issue as it arises — pollution, global warming, species extinction — how each matter unfolds is entirely up to those three cardinal groups.

Not many journalists understand this symbiosis the way renowned science journalist Stephen Nash does. Nash, who has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Boston Globe, and Bioscience magazine, is one of Virginia’s leading climate change experts.

Author of Virginia Climate Fever: How Global Warming Will Transform Our Cities, Shorelines, and Forests, Nash’s award-winning book lays bare the future of Virginia, should the degradation of our environment continue. For Nash, it is the inherent responsibility of the media to inform the public of the state of our planet.

“In scale and intensity, climate change, or ‘climate disruption,’ is the biggest and most immediate challenge facing humanity — with the possible exception of nuclear war,” Nash said. “[Environmental] science, more than ever, has come to have enormous consequences for us. So now, more than ever, journalists and scientists must be able to explain those consequences to the public.”

Writing about the environment was inevitable for Nash. As a child, he discovered his love of nature exploring the woodlands of California and Oregon, where his stepfather was a logger. Today, Nash is the very picture of a conservationist — with his white mustache and his lanky frame. Bright blue eyes, set in weathered skin, divulge signs of a life spent in the sun and the wind.

Nash, who firmly believes that it is the role of the media to inform the public, said that he is often frustrated by fellow journalists who deny the consequences of climate change, and thus, limit the role of the public in inducing any real change.

“[Climate change] is beginning to get the more consistent coverage it merits,” Nash said. “Still, denial of climate disruption is a kind of political religion for many Americans, so, they prop up their belief systems with ‘media’ that are not journalism. They’re fantasy entertainment, ideological zealotry.”

Stephen Nash

“A few hurricanes, mega-forest fires, droughts, floods and famines from now, those fantasies and that religion will become insupportable. But old gods die hard, especially if they’re still stuffing your corporate pocketbook.”

When the media denies climate change, the public denies it. Businesses that rely on fossil fuels and drill oil deny it, out of financial interest and just plain fear. Media funded by corporate money deny climate change together, Nash said.

But worst of all, according to Nash, is when the government denies the wrecking of our environment, because it is so very important that they play a role in fixing it.

“When the government is taken over by those corporate interests and their mass-media mouthpieces, denial of science that doesn’t serve their interests is a top priority,” he said. “It is essential that the government play a role in environmental conservation, and the public must understand that. False media outlets like Fox News tells its audiences that the government is interfering and infringing on our liberties if it takes on this role, but that’s just not true.”

Ultimately, though, even the government cannot be relied upon, Nash said. It is the people and the fact-based media that must work together to invoke change. Recycling, using solar panels and wind power — those are minor actions that will as a whole have a larger impact, but Nash encourages taking action on a grander scale.

“Conservation now is a political, not an individual process,” he said. “So people can play their most useful roles by joining together — and fighting for political change that will make conservation possible.”

“CBS This Morning” anchor Charlie Rose, NPR news chief Michael Oreskes, New York Times political reporter Glenn Thrush, political analyst Mark Halperin, and now “Today Show” host Matt Lauer have all lost their job or been suspended due to sexual harassment claims.

President Donald Trump (R), Senator Al Franken (D), Representative John Conyers (D), and Senate-hopeful Roy Moore (R) are all facing credible accusations on their own– but continue to keep their jobs.

Roy Moore

Rep. Conyers is facing pressure from Democratic leadership behind closed doors, but he continues to vigorously deny the accusations – although he admitted to paying a former staffer with taxpayer money after she accused him of sexual harassment. On Thursday, one of Conyers’ accusers, Marion Brown, went on the Today Show to discuss the allegations. She said he “violated her body” and frequently propositioned her for sex.

Almost every Republican leader in government – with the exception of their leader, Trump – has denounced Moore for pursuing underage girls. However, he still remains active on the campaign trail and shows no sign of bowing out. Franken has apologized for his mistakes after photos surfaced of him groping a woman while she was sleeping. However, he shows no signs that he believes he should resign. Trump was recorded on tape saying that he grabs women by the “pu**y” because he is famous and they let him do it. The other participant in that tape, Billy Bush, was fired by NBC News for what he contributed to that tape.

Sixteen women have now accused Donald Trump of sexual assault. He was elected President of the United States within a few months of this information coming to light, while at the same time making Bill Clinton’s sexual misconduct a constant topic of coverage during the election.

President Trump

Washington has long had a history of politicians playing sexual scandal situations close to the vest. The Congressional Accountability Act of 1995 made that much easier for them. Originally, it was intended to force members of Congress to be held to the same standards as the rest of the professional world. Instead, it created a way for sexual harassment cases to be settled using taxpayer money – with the process and participants of the settlement being kept a complete secret. Not to mention the first step that an accuser takes under this act after is to take a 90-day “mandatory dispute resolution process.” Which essentially is a “cooling off” period where the accuser has to continue to work and interact with the accused.

17 million dollars in taxpayer-funded settlements have occurred under this resolution since 1997. The Office of Compliance handles these funds. They say that the fund covers most Capitol Hill employers, so not all of these funds are used for lawmakers’ transgressions.

This is drastically different than the process that we have witnessed taking place in the private sector. Matt Lauer’s employers were notified of a complaint against him on Monday night, and he was released from his position at NBC less than 48 hours later. Later on Wednesday, we learned from Variety, who claimed to have been working on this story for months, that Lauer had been committing inappropriate acts for years. From having a button on his desk to lock his office door, to gifting a coworker a sex toy and letting her know how he wanted to use it with her. Louis C.K.’s film company canceled his next movie premiere and multiple media companies cut ties with him after his transgressions hit the news. CBS, Bloomberg, and PBS released Charlie Rose within a day of his accusations going public.

Matt Lauer

Yet the disparities between politicians and media personalities continue to persist, even with an announcement by Northern Virginia Congresswoman Barbara Comstock. On Wednesday, the House of Representatives passed an anti-harassment resolution that the Congresswoman introduced. The bill requires Representatives to participate in yearly sexual harassment training.

“There is no room for sexual harassment in the workplace and we must have zero tolerance for harassment of any kind, especially in Congress,” said Comstock. “This legislation we passed here today is a strong first step in fundamentally reforming how we address the insidious problem of sexual harassment in the workplace and committing to a healthy, safe working environment free from sexual harassment.”

This is surely a step in the right direction, but forcing members to participate in a yearly training does very little to address the actual harassment that has occurred. These resolutions also don’t address the biggest possible offender of all – the President.

The media, tech moguls, Hollywood producers, comedians, and athletes are typically forced to pay for their transgressions themselves. If not with their own funds, it’s the employers they worked for that enabled their behavior. This is also usually accompanied by a pink slip from that enabler.

Politicians have been using taxpayer money to pay off their accusers under a code of silence enacted by themselves, or their predecessors for over 20 years. As a result, lawmaker’s are allowed to push their moral beliefs and judgment’s into our law books – but they don’t hold themselves accountable to that same standard. Why should citizens trust them to police themselves? Citizens should be able to trust that the individuals elected to run our country truly have the interests and safety of their citizens at heart. That is getting harder and harder to believe, more so since the revelations that they will cover up the mistreatment of women to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. The citizens that are being publicly shamed and losing their jobs deserve every ounce of this.

So the question remains, why aren’t our elected leaders receiving the same ridicule and justice?